Editorial: May the truth set us free on torture debate

Monday

Apr 27, 2009 at 12:01 AMApr 27, 2009 at 9:16 AM

Sometimes Americans seem to look at torture with all the detachment of watching an episode of TV's "24," rooting from their recliners for Jack Bauer to come to the rescue against the bad guys who are as bad as bad can be. There's no place in prime time for doubt or moral confusion, which is exactly the way most of us like it. No disturbing the comfort zone.

Sometimes Americans seem to look at torture with all the detachment of watching an episode of TV's "24," rooting from their recliners for Jack Bauer to come to the rescue against the bad guys who are as bad as bad can be. There's no place in prime time for doubt or moral confusion, which is exactly the way most of us like it. No disturbing the comfort zone.

Unfortunately, real life is rarely so accommodating.

So it goes with the ramped-up calls for a national truth commission to investigate reports of torture - or "enhanced interrogation techniques," if you prefer; suppose it depends on whether you're on the giving or receiving end - authorized by the Bush administration in America's war on terrorism.

President Barack Obama, initially reluctant to go down this path, said last week that he won't try to block any congressional inquiries into those practices. Nonetheless, he is not pushing prosecution beyond that, and has expressed legitimate concerns "about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and that it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations." Clearly, he's discovering the difference between candidate and commander in chief.

Still, the heat has been ratcheted up considerably the last few weeks for a formal inquiry, following an International Red Cross report that concluded the U.S. engaged in torture of terrorism suspects; the recent release of Justice Department memos authorizing tougher interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, among the first of the prized al-Qaida leaders to be captured; the declassification of a previous congressional investigation that found evidence of the green light for the military's treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo coming from the highest levels of the Pentagon; and reporting by the New York Times and others that there was bipartisan awareness of these Korean War-era, communist torture techniques in 2002, with few if any objections raised by anyone in the executive or legislative branches.

Some very prominent names have surfaced in those reports - former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; former CIA chief George Tenet; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Department of Justice attorneys John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury; current Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, then being briefed as a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee; and of course former Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush.

This editorial page has long voiced reservations about these "enhanced interrogation techniques." If U.S. Sen. John McCain says they're torture - and the former POW and GOP presidential nominee has said so - we're inclined to take his word for it. Such practices contradict the principles America has long espoused, and compromise this nation's moral standing in the world. As such they provide ammunition to our enemies, who don't need much. We trust most Americans believe in the rule of law; certainly many have made the case that these measures were violations of both international and U.S. law.

Nonetheless, this isn't as clear-cut as first it might seem. First, if we had someone in custody with personal knowledge of an imminent nuclear or biological or otherwise major attack on a U.S. city, with time ticking away, we think 99 percent of Americans would favor doing whatever it takes to extract the information necessary to prevent that, without sweating the details.

Second, it's only fair to provide some context here. The White House was operating in the aftermath of 9-11. It was not irrational to fear another al-Qaida attack. As President Bush said at his farewell press conference in January. "These debates will matter not if there's another attack on the homeland. The question won't be ... were you critical of this plan or not; the question is ... why didn't you do something?" They were under enormous pressure. We've not doubted the sincerity of their professed aims to protect American lives.

What's troublesome here is the alleged institutionalization of torture as official government policy, its use as a first option rather than a last, and the sometimes tortured - forgive the term - rationalizations for it. While there is a risk in getting to the bottom of all this publicly - we're not without concern about that - Americans should be willing to let the truth set us free.

We should be willing to let Dick Cheney testify as to how it was necessary - and not torture - to waterboard two top al-Qaida operatives a reported 266 times to get the information he claims saved thousands of American lives. The former vice president seems eager enough to talk about it.

And we should be just as willing to let Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who participated in the initial interrogations of Zubaydah, disagree, as he did in a New York Times op-ed recently, writing that the interrogation policy was "un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security."

What tips the balance for us is the philosophical conviction that Americans have a right to know, for the most part, what their government is doing in their name, and that details have been emerging anyway, drip by drip. So enough of the denial-and-admission dance; let's explore the interrogations, the "extraordinary rendition," the warrantless wiretaps, the question of how powerful any president should be, even in wartime, with prudent limitations on the release of classified information. Reasonable transparency should be the goal for now; as for accountability, we'll see.

And in the end let us acknowledge that few if any other nations on Earth would even be contemplating such an airing. May the world give us credit for that, while recognizing that such soul-searching is reserved for the strong.